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BF · Burkina Faso · –

Piéla fire, 5 November 2026 Piéla, Bogandé

Dying down · last detection 8 Nov 2026, 13:40 UTC

The fire started on 5 November 2026 in Piéla, Burkina Faso, and satellites saw it burning for 4 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 1,181 hectares from heat detections, spread across 2 municipalities.

Number 305 in Burkina Faso in 2026, of 382.

GWIS near-real-time perimeter, from the layer that changed in August 2025: this fire is not compared with fires from earlier years, because since then the GWIS layer gives more and larger perimeters.

Is it still active?

No detections since 8 Nov 2026, 13:40 UTC. That usually means no flame is visible from space any more, although hotspots may remain. Satellites pass a few times a day and cloud or smoke can hide the fire: a lack of detections is not an official extinction. Each country’s emergency service declares a fire contained or out.

Burnt area
1,181ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
4days
5 Nov 2026 – 8 Nov 2026
Municipalities hit
2
communes
Started on
5 Nov
2026
Heat detections
11
in a single hotspot: 150 MW
Danger at start
47
Very high · FWI index
Average daily power
528MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 5 Nov8 Nov
8 Nov 2026

How it evolved, day by day

5 Nov 2026 · 0 MW · 0 8 Nov 2026 · 528 MW · 11
5 Nov 8 Nov

Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.

The weather it burned in

38°high
32km/h · peak gust
14%lowest humidity

It had gone 29 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

65% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 156 ha in 2024, 694 ha in 2025. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 769 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 0.7% of the area of London (12 km² against 1,583 km²).

London boundary: geoBoundaries · Office for National Statistics (Open Government Licence v3.0).

This compares size, not location: both shapes are at the same scale, north up, centred on each other.

What happened to each town

  1. Piéla where it started
    1,188 ha reached on 5 Nov
    1.2 %
  2. 0 ha
    0.0 %

Burnt area inside each municipality, from crossing the GWIS perimeter with administrative boundaries. The distance runs from the point marking the centre of each area to the nearest fire: staying a kilometre away does not mean it reached the houses.

The weather day by day

ECMWF ERA5 reanalysis at the fire location, the standard reference for past weather, and the Canadian Fire Weather Index (the same system Copernicus uses), computed by WorldFires from that data. Days after the fire run until the first rain.

Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0) · forecast models, provisional until the ERA5 reanalysis arrives

Day High Min. humidity Peak gust Rain Danger (FWI)
5 Nov 38.2 °C 16 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 47
6 Nov 38.2 °C 14 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
7 Nov 37.7 °C 19 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 38
8 Nov 37.8 °C 17 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
9 Nov after 37.2 °C 22 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41

Before and after, from space

Drag the line to compare the same ground before the fire and after it.

Before · 29 Oct 2026
After · 8 Nov 2026

If the day is cloudy, change the date: each satellite passes once a day. In false colour the burnt ground looks brown or red.

The smoke

CAMS · Copernicus

On 8 November 2026 the air beside the fire reached 93 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 43: 2.9 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak93 µg/m³
Days over the guideline5 days
PM10175 µg/m³
Optical depth0.45
3 Nov5 Nov7 Nov
Good Fair Moderate Poor Very poor Extremely poor

Particles from the Copernicus CAMS model at the centre of the perimeter; these are not measurements in each town. The pale bar is the worst hour, the solid one the daily average.

Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0) · Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS)

Detections table · 11Every satellite heat detection, one by one, with time, satellite, power and coordinates.
⬇ Download CSV Times in UTC. Each detection is a 375 m pixel: a large fire yields hundreds per pass.
Date and timeSatelliteFRP (MW)LatLon

Other fires nearby

All fires in Burkina Faso

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Piéla fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 5 November 2026 and 8 November 2026: 4 days between the first and last heat detection of the perimeter.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 1,181 hectares (11.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire entered 2 municipalities: Piéla (1,188 ha, 1.2 %); Bogandé (0 ha, 0.0 %).
Is the Piéla fire still active?
No fire detections since 8 Nov 2026, 13:40 UTC. A lack of detections is not an official extinction.
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 38.2 °C, humidity dropped to 14 % and gusts hit 32 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 47, class Very high.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Burkina Faso (OCHA COD-AB). It is not an official report.

Where to verify it

A satellite detection is not an official report. Final figures and the fire’s status are published by each country’s emergency service.

Satellite cross-check

History of this page · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 9 November 2026.
  1. Page published (1,181 ha).

RSS Changes to this page With cross-checks and a citable version

Does something look wrong on this page?

This page is built from satellite data and official records, and it sometimes gets things wrong: the wrong dates, the wrong town, two fires merged into one, or something that was not a wildfire at all. If you know this fire first-hand (you live nearby, saw it, fought it or reported on it), tell us what really happened and we will check it.

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How we know this
  • Perimeter: GWIS (Copernicus), rebuilt from heat detections rather than mapped on imagery.
  • Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 11 Suomi-NPP VIIRS detections on those dates.
  • We have not matched this page with any official record.
  • Weather: ECMWF IFS model, provisional until the ERA5 reanalysis arrives.

How we build fire pages: methodology

Where this data comes from

The perimeter comes from the Copernicus Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS), which rebuilds it from MODIS and VIIRS heat detections and publishes it under CC BY 4.0. It is not measured on imagery as in Europe, so it is an estimate. Heat detections come from the VIIRS sensors aboard Suomi-NPP and NOAA-20, distributed by NASA FIRMS at 375 m resolution. Municipal boundaries come from OCHA COD-AB (Institut Geographique Burkina (IGB)) (Creative Commons Attribution for Intergovernmental Organisations (CC BY-IGO)). The area per municipality is computed by WorldFires by crossing the perimeter with those boundaries, so it may differ from each country’s official figure.